The Room in the Firehouse
By Brian Doyle - From One Long River of Song
So I went to a meeting with a friend. It was early in the morning in the town’s firehouse. The firemen had lent a room to these meetings for thirty years. My friend was rattled and defensive. It was the first time my friend had been to such a meeting. We sat in a quiet corner. Most people sat against the walls but a few sat at a table in the center of the room. There were women and men of all ages. The young man next to me fidgeted the entire ninety minutes of the meeting except when it was his turn to speak. A woman across from us knitted furiously the whole meeting, stopping only when it was her turn to speak. People took turns speaking. There was no particular order. A slight man in a baseball cap spoke first. He was wry and funny about the hash he had made of his life. Most of the people who spoke were wry and funny. One man’s voice shook when he spoke and the man next to him reached over and put his gnarled hand on his shoulder.
Even though many of the speakers were wry and funny, their stories were not. Their stories were awful. Wives walking out the door with children, and police cars and police vans and police officers and court judges and probation officers, and broken teeth and bones, and having to camp in city parks, and companions who froze to death in alleys, and waking up in strange rooms with strange people, and your own children quietly locking the door when they saw it was you on the front porch, and security officers escorting you off the premises as you walked along with all the stuff that had been in your office cubicle now crammed into a big cardboard box, and walking out of meetings like this because meetings like this were for losers, not for you, and you didn’t need this vaguely religious holding-hands stuff, and then sitting right by the door so you could leave when it got to be too much, but then later taking a seat all the way inside, and maybe someday you would even sit at the table, although sitting at the table means you have to be savagely honest with yourself and everyone else about what you cannot do without help, and being that kind of desperately honest is unbelievably awfully hard.
But I sat in a quiet corner of a firehouse and listened as one person after another was that searingly honest, and did speak openly and ruefully about what one man called the delicious disaster, and I was so moved I could not speak for some moments after the meeting ended. My friend did not seem moved and strode out of the meeting appearing glad that it was over, and dismissive of those poor people, and I wished my friend was not dismissive of those people. It seemed to me that those people were the wealthiest people I ever saw in honest humility. It seemed to me they were battling ferociously to turn horror into some small shivering peace and maybe even someday somehow a shy stagger of joy. It seemed to me that they were great because they knew they were not great, healthy because they knew they were ill, admirable because they knew they were not admirable at all by the measures of the real world, as another man called the world outside the room in the firehouse.
There was something great in that room. There is something great in all the thousands of rooms like it in America, the millions of rooms like it around the world. I don’t have a good word for that great thing, but I saw it, staggering like a new foal, from where I sat silently in the corner. My friend did not yet appear to see it, or try to reach for it, and there was nothing I could do to make that happen. But perhaps part of the great thing that happens in these rooms is that, though no one can open that window for anyone else, everyone can applaud when someone does reach for that crack of light, shyly, shaking a little. My friend and I heard that applause several times in the room in the firehouse, and it sounded like the most wonderful painful music to me.
Luke 5:29-32 . . . Then Levi hosted a great banquet for Jesus at his house. A large crowd of tax collectors was there, along with others who were eating with them. But the Pharisees and their scribes complained to Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.”
Luke 18:9-14 . . . To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”